Rebranding and guilt

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett of 4 Privet Drive Vagenda Magazine is proud to say she's perfectly normal, thank you very much. She likes normal stuff, like the Mail Online, diets, twerking in the kitchen and updating her popular feminist website. But trouble looms on the horizon! Other women - feminists no less! - appear to have suggested that a life that is not constantly 110% dedicated to the Advancement of Women People, every second of the day, might not be the life of a feminist at all. This is a problem for Cosslett, who describes herself as a "half-arsed, accidental feminist" and who therefore cannot conform to the impossible standards of full-arsed, on-purpose feminists. The conclusion is that feminism must be rebranded to accommodate the myriad of women who, metaphorically or literally, are missing 50% of their bums.

The "rebranding" of feminism is a concept that's been doing the rounds for a few months now, and it's fair to say that its a bit divisive. It kicked off with Elle Magazine's decision to team three feminist groups with three ad agencies in order to make some pictures that the average Tumblr user could probably have done in half the time and none of the budget:

The shapes! The colours! The mention of gender pay gaps! I have no doubt that this will be a game changer, thanks Mother.

The Vagenda was one of the organisations which participated in the "rebranding" exercise, resulting in an advert which looks pretty much like the one above but with more words and using white instead of yellow. They also started an "Iamawomanand" campaign - which needs to be said really fast, as one word, for the full effect - which might look similar to the "I need feminism because..." placard campaigns that have been running since well before this reblanding (that was a typo but you know what, let's run with it) but it isn't the same thing because this was an "Iamawomanand" campaign.

Anyway, those things happened, almost two months ago now, and everybody cared for about five minutes about the campaigns themselves before they disappeared into internet history, probably to be reinvented again as completely new and exciting ideas in a few months time. As far as I'm concerned, nothing about Elle's campaign or the people involved in it was wrong except for the word "rebranding", which turned out to be a pointless word anyway because the end product was about as generic and already-been-done as it comes. Taking the f-word out of pro-women messages and putting them in a mainstream magazine doesn't change the fact that this has all been done before.

And, hey, you know who has done all of this before? Feminists. And probably not full-arsed, on-purpose feminists either. Because when Cosslett starts comparing her part-time feminism to people who allegedly give all of their internal organs to the Matriarchal Conspiracy when they join the movement, she is in fact comparing herself to people who do not exist. No teenage girl wakes up one day and goes "You know what, I'm a feminist now, I will devote my life solely to the sisterhood and do nothing except smash patriarchy for the rest of my natural life". We all have to divide our time between smashing patriarchy and living in the actual world. 

It is a necessary difficulty of feminism - a necessary difficulty of being a person! - that living in the actual world involves a certain amount of Getting It Wrong. We are tuned into a struggle for equality in a world full of systemic oppression, which is designed so that many of our choices reinforce that inequality no matter what we do. And it's a normal human reaction to feel guilty about those choices, even if there's nothing we can do about them. Feminism can't exonerate even the most full-arsed activist from sometimes screwing up and feeling bad about it. All we can do is try to balance minimal damage with maximum activism whilst making sure to take care of ourselves and the people around us.

This is not a defence of feminism's status quo, which does have problems with inclusivity both because of patriarchal misrepresentation and more importantly because it still lets down women on the margins, who are then told that their infighting is part of the reason the movement needs "rebranding" in the first place. But these glaring problems are unlikely to be solved by advertising agencies and Elle magazine, and working towards solving it is not going to make the Rihannon Lucy Cossletts of the world feel any better about reading the Mail Online sometimes. We are all going to have to bite the bullet and accept that, metaphorically, perhaps we are all a little lacking in the arse department.

NOTE: I just had a culturally impaired friend question my decision to "dox" Cosslett, so for anybody else out there who doesn't recognise the opening line from Harry Potter on sight: 4 Privet Drive is not the address of anybody in this article, it's the address of Vernon and Petunia Dursley, that is the joke, I swear upon my honour that never ever ever will I threaten the privacy of another person on this blog unless they are a fictional character from a popular wizarding franchise. This is a nice blog with standards, innit.

Why femen should probably just stop. now.

Did I say update last Sunday? I did. Back to the old habits so soon!

This will be up on Femusings tomorrow but here's a sneaky preview for blog readers. I love you guys! I mean, go to Femusings too. But also keep coming here.

Boobies in this post!

It’s always quite inconvenient when feminist things get ruined by manipulative men. Just ask anybody involved with the dismal Hugo Schwyzer, who set himself up as a paragon of reformed male feminism only to have a lengthy meltdown involving twitter marathons, manipulative semi-apologies, a (hopefully!) career-ending confession about sleeping with students and perhaps the most obtuse Jezebel article ever written. Of course, plenty of people were already well aware of how sleazy Schwyzer has always been, not a difficult conclusion to come to given that his main man-feminist tactic was to tell sob stories about awful things he used to do but now virtuously refrains from. The discovery that the virtuous refraining was in fact compulsive lying therefore came more as a depressing confirmation rather than a stunning revelation. A manipulative man ruining a thing? Not really so surprising to most of us, unfortunately.

So it goes with Femen, who this week are sending their activists into damage control mode with a new documentary, “Ukraine is not a brothel”, which reveals that the entire movement was masterminded by their “advisor” Victor Svyatski. On camera, Svyatski claims that “on some deep unconscious level” he probably started the group to meet girls, which is pretentious manipulative man speak for “I am very clever and self-aware and am going to tell you nasty truths in a really clever way so the intelligence and honesty will cancel out my utter moral bankruptcy”. He also makes a long statement about how his presence was necessary because on their own the women of Femen are weak and directionless and need a strong male hand. Clearly these are not the words of a man who expects to endear himself to a wider audience, so it’s probably not surprising that “leading member” Inna Shevchenko has come out to say that Svyatski has been out of Femen for a year, they all knew how awful he was most of the time, and anyway they came up with topless protests on their own and didn’t need him. Except they sort of did. But they don’t any more! All is well and feminine in the land of Femen.

The damage has been done, however. In March, Tunisian Amina Sboui’s topless protest and subsequent arrest provoked a range of Islamophobic responses from Femen members in various cities: prompting Sboui herself to publically leave Femen at the end of August, suggesting that a more specific anarchist movement might be more her thing. She and others have pointed out the lack of transparency in the group’s finances, with most members apparently completely unaware of how the group funds itself. And it’s long been an open secret that the group selects its members based on their conventional attractiveness. Scouring both press photographs and the pictures the group takes of themselves reveals very few muffin tops or stretch marks, and racial diversity is limited to a couple of shots of light-skinned black women. Sometimes these perfect-bodied women paint “breast feeding army” onto themselves, to demonstrate how great breasts are even though most mothers could tell you that post-natal perfect bodies look a bit different to the pornographic ideal.

Could I find this scene recreated in any number of demeaning videos on RedTube? Absolutely.

Because the thing about Femen, really, is that they are trying to “smash the patriarchy” by upholding the pornographic ideal of women. While writing this article, I spent a very long time refreshing the Femen website to check out the different banners they have. My favourite is a beautifully-dishevelled slim naked women glaring sensually at the camera with white semen-like liquid oozing out of her mouth. This is made feminist by the fact she is flipping the audience off and “Fickt die Sexindustrie” (fuck the sex industry) is written over the top of the picture. The “X” in sex is a swastika, for that extra edgy touch! When they’re not taking these sorts of subversive selfies, Femen are out on street protests which are designed to attract media attention by setting up one of two kinds of shots: either straight-up male gaze objectification shots of hot naked bodies, or images of nearly-naked women being dominated and controlled by fully-clothed men. Now, where else have I seen nearly-naked women being dominated and controlled by fully-clothed men this summer? Oh, that’s right, Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”. That feminist classic.

Nudity and objectification are regularly used as tools to degrade women, and that makes a movement to reclaim the female body an incredibly important part of the feminist movement. It also makes it a very difficult thing to get right. The difference between pictures of nude activists in newspapers about men with their clothes on, and pictures of nude glamour models in newspapers about men with their clothes on, is a quite nuanced set of concepts about intent and power and ownership that make it enormously important that the work of groups like Femen is done right. If, as the latest allegations suggest, this work is being done as a result of male desire to manipulate women into being naked, this all becomes a lot less nuanced and a lot more straightforwardly awful. That there are women like Sevchenko who do appear to passionately believe in their organisation’s goals is a step in the right direction, but if Femen aren’t constantly considering how topless protests fit in to a wider feminist dialogue involving more than just hardy nubile white girls, and particularly into the massive grey area that is female nudity and pornography, then they are failing in their job as anti-patriarchy provocateurs. And if they have been producing male gaze pornography and images of women being dominated on the directive of a man who believes that his own presence is necessary to make the movement happen at all, then the group’s use of nudity becomes effectively indistinguishable from any other male-mandated use of women’s bodies. Femen’s message turns from women smashing patriarchy to patriarchy having a bigoted, self absorbed conversation with itself, using women’s bodies as notepaper.

When Robin Thicke turned around and said Blurred Lines was a feminist manifesto, nobody gave him the time of day- rightfully so, both because he was already on record saying “what a pleasure it is to degrade a woman” and because you can’t just add feminist meaning to any random act that involves women. When people who are in favour of Page 3 suggest it’s a tool of empowerment because Censorship Is Wrong, we laugh at them or facepalm, or maybe both if we are feeling particularly co-ordinated on that day, because that is missing the fundamental point about what the intention of Page 3 is. If the Stunning Revelations about Victor Svyatski came at the end of a stunningly successful year for Femen, in which they challenged pornographic ideals and promoted an inclusive movement and designed strong, clever protests which made for rallying symbols and furthered the feminist cause, the information in “Ukraine is not a brothel” would be shocking and sad but also not insurmountable. But, as with Hugo Schwyzer, the fact that Femen are not who they say they are is frankly old news. Pessimists win, the world gets a little sadder, but it’s time to close the door on this particular group. The movement to reclaim the female body is going to need some new and better champions.

Bitesize For Glory

Here we go!

Secretly confirming the myth that all girls want to be princesses

Because if even rampant feminists like royal fantasies once in a while, then surely that makes it universal to all womankind. Or maybe I just like Princeless because she has the same name as me.

I've still been busy in the comic world since my last post about it, and one of the things I discovered was this amazing comic, which turns the "princess locked in a tower" trope into a systematic thing and then has one particular princess and her guard dragon escape together, so the princess can disguise herself as a knight and go off to rescue her other six sisters, who are also all locked up around the kingdom. She teams up with a half-dwarf blacksmith who is similarly cool. Oh, and the princess is called Adrienne! Did you notice that? That's really cool.

The comic is occasionally a little self-conscious about trope busting - notably, there's a scene about bikini armour which is really quite forced (haha! the female smith character never even considered that women could wear full protective armour! haha... wait, what?) and book two sets up a "big mystery" which is pretty obvious within ten pages, although it seems like it's meant to be a long-running thing. But hey, it's all-ages, and it's incredibly good at lampooning misogynistic characters as well as expanding racial diversity beyond the "white people and mythical creatures" dichotomy that fantasy usually relies on. Also there is a great scene about hair management, which is always a winner for me.

You can check out Princeless some more at its tumblr, here, which includes download links if you go far enough. Princess Adrienne! How cool is that.

Pronouns for trans people

Should be the pronouns the individual requests. If a person says they are a woman, it's common knowledge to even novice english speakers that the correct pronouns are "she", "her" and "her[s]". This does not involve difficult mind-blowing questions about the nature of gender, because pronouns for men and for women are deeply ingrained into our language and it is very simple not-even-trans-101 to learn that trans women are women.

Now you know this, you can go and despair at the absurd number of news websites who are wrong in their coverage of Chelsea Manning.

Miss Tibet

I follow the Tibetan human rights activist Woeser on Twitter, ostensibly to practice my Chinese although really it's for when she puts up interesting stuff like this. I have mixed feelings about this sort of portrayal of Tibet and very mixed feelings about beauty pageants, especially those designed by men for women. Some of the video editing is also unintentionally hilarious, which is unfortunate. But it's still worth watching with a critical eye. And at least the organiser personally asked the Dalai Lama what he thinks of beauty pageants, so that's definitely a great opinion to have. Right?

Medieval poison rings were totally a thing that existed

Hey, you know what, let's play up the poisonous devious women stereotype briefly to point out how cool this is! Evidence would suggest it was used in Bulgaria by men, to kill other men, making it disappointingly like the vast majority of other weapons in human history. Still. Poison ring!

Doctor Jude Roberts, Porn User

You might have recently seen an image doing the rounds of a BBC Newsnight program in which a woman discussing pornography got effectively stripped of her doctorate by some hapless caption people. She wrote about the experience (and more on her stance on porn) for Femusings, and it's an excellent read.

And... that's a wrap!

Yes, dear reader: 30 days, 30 blogs. 29 on here, one exclusively on Femusings. I came, I saw, I wrote a lot of things even when I really didn't want to write anything at all (the tooth thing is still a thing, although the antibiotics are finally starting to work their magic thank goodness). Hopefully many of these things were enlightening for you! Most of them make me pretty happy.

What's next? Well, there will not be one blog every day again for quite some time. There will probably be no blogs at all here for at least a week whilst I read, recharge, enjoy the bank holiday weekend and hopefully kick this infection once and for all. BUT there will be a second "around the world" piece for Femusings over the weekend, and Stuff I like Sunday will return as a regular fixture from Sunday September 1. Depending on how busy I get and how prolific I remain without being under pressure, bitesize blogging may also become a regular fixture. I quite enjoy it!

In the long term, this blog is going to remain the major home for all of my discussion of media and culture, and for image- and link-heavy things that I want to do that belong on personal blogs like this. My news and current affairs pieces will be over on Femusings, and I'm not sure yet how much longer I will keep cross posting for - but they'll still exist, they just won't be on this particular website any more!

Thanks very much for reading (no matter how much or how little you actually read) and watch this space- I'll be back very soon.

Men and Laurie Penny and PAIN OW PAIN (30 days of blogging day 29)

Hello world! I'm still on barely-acceptable amounts of pain medication, as well as several days of antibiotics, copious amounts of corsodyl and worst of all a period of enforced sobriety right at the moment when my parents restocked the beer fridge with delicious raspberry cider. I've actually started a couple of proper articles, got a paragraph through them, and then had my face start paining so hard I actually just want to take a pair of scissors to the inside of my mouth and see if stabbing it might make it hurt less. At this point I'm going with "maybe"!

 I am so extraordinarily impressed by anyone who does pain management on a regular basis. I know usually people have more resources than just paracetamol and ibuprofen but still ‒ I consider myself a relatively hardy person and having this for just three days has already left me so behind and up in the air on all the things I have to do. Anybody who copes with something like this for longer- you're incredible. Coping with your body pulling this on you is incredible, doing anything on top of it is superhuman. Wow, you.

Anyway, this was going to be a lead-in to a bitesize article, but I actually ended up writing something reasonably long about one single topic so I'm seamlessly integrating now. Here is my seamless integration, isn't it great? Oh boy my mouth hurts. It's about half an hour until I can have another painkiller.

So Laurie Penny's article about men has been doing the rounds on my Facebook, and it's got me thinking about dudes again. I know, lame right? If you haven't read that article, go and do so, because it's a thought-provoking read both for its content (which I pretty much agree with) and for its tactics. The discourse has been concentrating so much on the minds of men who do seem to hate women recently, it seems like a good time to point out that most individual men don't hate women (although the ones that tell you they're good to women because they have sisters are probably lying). But it's also important to figure out how to reconcile the fact that, yes, most men are good people who want equality with the fact that no, we don't actually have equality and few people even realise what it would look like and derailing the few strands of discussion we have going really doesn't help anyone.

So enter Laurie Penny, to point out that there's a difference between woman hating individuals and a woman hating culture, and we accept that most men are not the former but all belong to the latter, whether they like it or not, and it's quite right to be angry about that but not right to direct this anger at women. So far so good, although more so than with any other feminist article, for the love of god do not read the comments here. Based on what I've seen around though, this article doesn't have quite the universally enlightening effect that you might have hoped.

What has been missing from the discussions I've seen so far (and hey, I have a paragraph, but OH GOD OH GOD PLEASE PLEASE STOP HURTING AHH WHAT CAN I DO TO MAKE YOU STOP I'LL DO ANYTHING I'LL CLOSE THIS WINDOW JUST ARGH NO OW OW OW you get the point) is an understanding of the difference between discrimination and sexism, and about how we can talk about the inequalities men see in a way that helps the general equality debate. Because, yes, a lot of the time those discussions are about how men are seen when caring for children, or worrying about being seen to be a bad person when you don't feel like you've done any of the things you're being accused of, or why nobody seems to care that there are women-only sports in the olympics but not men-only ones, isn't that sexism too? Sometimes this sort of stuff is derailing can't-win nonsense from uninteresting weirdos, but more often it's meant genuinely, and it's unfortunate that the existence of the former can make us a lot less amenable to dealing with the latter.

Discrimination and sexism are two different things, because sexism requires a power structure. This does rely on a bit more of an academic definition of sexism than is often understood, but at heart it's a simple point and it's one that bears repeating again and again and again when we talk about men in feminism. Men do deal with discrimination for being men, sometimes - and sometimes, the big example being with fathers, it's in very big, obvious areas of their lives! But these discriminatory experiences don't actually harm the overall superiority of men in society, and here's the important bit: they're usually because men are trying to do something feminine, and getting ridiculed for it. They face discrimination because being coded feminine is considered inherently negative for men, and therefore doing one of the relatively few femimine coded activities is dubious at best, taboo at worst.

Penny's article is a powerful argument for the difference between cultures and individuals which is important in underpinning why feminist discourse needs to discuss generalisations about systemic sexism without having every  decent man have to individually note they are an exception. Next up I hope is the powerful argument about why if men want to tackle this inequality (as most do, because as much as we are driven to despair by them sometimes, most men do believe in equality and want it to be true in the world they live in) the way to start tearing down barriers for both women and men is to confront why we devalue femininity so much.

It's the old "sexism hurts men too!" chestnut in a different form, I know. I'm not saying we hand over space to endless postulating about why men are portrayed as stupid in adverts or what would happen if the draft came back. But if talking about feminine-coded activities is the gateway drug to getting men to confront the systemic sexism which makes those activities "wrong" for men, then fine, I'll have that conversation as many times as I can stomach.

This is not the powerful argument article. Not yet. Maybe later. Time for mouthwash.

Is this the end for our intrepid heroine?

It's day twenty eight! That's four full weeks of blogging, possibly more than anybody else in the entire universe has ever done before. If there were gold medals for blogs, I would be tearing down this analogy's equivalent to a track right now, the end in sight, knowing I was about to win the big prize and everything was going to be OK. And yet! In the final lap, disaster! Sprained ankle! Broken leg (although that didn't stop that olympic relay runner)! Or in this specific case, extreme chronic pain from a wisdom tooth that's been completely fine for about three years and has suddenly decided it hates the world!

(This is totally me pandering to the people who get to this blog by Googling 'dentist Drilling in "my mouth" '. Ok the one person. Look, I'm a useful blog for all your dental needs, one person! Come back soon!)

Anyway, I am literally sitting here chewing a garlic clove.Which genuinely works by the way, although it works best in combination with constant barely-within-instructed-dose cocktails of ibuprofen, paracetamol and teething gel, but no, I can testify that on its own, the ibuprofen, paracetamol and teething gel does not stop the constant shooting pains from throat to ear, but putting raw garlic in your mouth at least makes you question what hurts most. This is the most distractingly, unpleasantly painful thing to happen to me since I got a cough for half a year and strained my intercostal muscles (not recommended). There are lots of pains that I can just power through but this is really not turning out to be one of them.

I'm pulling up. I'm staggering on. The commentators are confused and possibly holding back the tears as the culmination of my journey moves from triumph to heartbreak.

Or something like that. I don't even know, I think these barely-within-instructed-dose drugs are doing things to my head that aren't just (aren't even) "taking away pain". Go and read this thing by Dr. Jude Roberts, Porn User while I find some more effective garden herbs to chew. See you tomorrow.

You've probably never heard of her.

As we come into the final week of Blog Every Day, I've had some more time to reflect on the impact it's had on the past few weeks. There's been some really great effects, like making 26-and-counting new pieces of writing in one form or another. There's also been some things that haven't changed, like my conviction that I don't ever have any good ideas for writing ‒ objectively, I'm genuinely not a prolific question-generator but an "oh, there's one idea, looks good enough, let's go with it" type of person", but evidence would suggest I do come up with some interesting things to talk about ‒ and some things that have actually been pretty rubbish. Foremost among the rubbish things has been the imbalance between the new data collections and potential information I'm taking in, and the amount of time I have to actually sit down with some of the stuff I've collected and really get to grips with it. I miss reading things that aren't on seven columns of Twitter! 

There's a similar trade-off with living at home. On the one hand, I have already gushed about how amazing my living space currently is, especially compared to the cupboard dorm I was living in in China. On the other hand, I have to get up reasonably early each morning to make sure my dog doesn't eat the post. It's all one big, exciting trade-off. The most exciting thing about being at home, of course, is having a telly that gets english channels and the most exciting thing on that telly is the wonderful afternoon quiz show Pointless.

A ridiculous number of these appear to be uploaded to Youtube, so if you like you can discover the magic for yourself, but basically the premise is this: four teams have to give answers to questions in different categories: either by naming something that fulfils a certain criteria (Matt Damon films, eponymous Beatrix Potter characters, nationalities that end in -ian) or by answering something from a set of themed questions. The catch is that these questions have all been asked to 100 hapless bystanders somewhere in the country before the show, and each answer has a score based on the number of bystanders who answered it right. The aim is to score as low as possible, which you do by giving answers that most of the 100 people didn't know. An answer that none of the 100 people knew is a Pointless answer, both because you got no points and because it is likely to be a very obscure piece of knowledge that you had no use for before coming onto a quiz show. It's great because sometimes they ask questions in categories where I can't possibly see how anybody could get anything wrong (like how could you not name every male Disney hero, who doesn't know what the Beast's real name is in this day and age, come on) and I feel very clever, and also because despite both being male, the presenters have some pretty awesome banter.

Therefore, in honour of my favourite daytime TV show, and of things I desperately want to read more about, let's play a Pointless inspired game! I am going to show you five pictures of different awesome women, and you are going to see which ones you can recognise. I haven't gone to the lengths of asking 100 people to tell me if they know them because if I had time to do that, I'd just read the damn books I want instead. But here goes:

Number 1: 

I may be deliberately choosing pictures of women who look like they will take no shit from anyone. Which is... ironic.

Number 2:

Occupation should be easy here at least...

Number 3:

Too easy again!

Number 4:

... yeah.

And finally, number 5:

This one's technically the easiest but I've made it harder by choosing another "not taking your shit" picture.

If we were playing the gameshow, this is the point where pairs of contestants would be looking at each other in horror, wondering why they are trapped with such an awful subject as "awesome women" (to be fair it is a little broad). If you don't guess right, you score the maximum 100 points which as we can all agree would be terrible for everyone involved, because TV quiz shows are very serious business. Anyway, think for a while about who you know out of those women, and how many other people you think 

Alright. Thought enough? Let's go through the board, as they say. Up there are the top in Number 1 is Cecelia Payne-Gaposchkin, who casually formulated the theory that the majority of the universe was made of hydrogen and helium in her doctorate thesis. Second is Mae Jemison, epic physicist who was the first African-American woman astronaut and the first real astronaut to also appear in Star Trek. Third is Stephanie Kwolek, who is holding kevlar in that picture because guess what, she invented it. Fourth, Nellie Bly, or Elizabeth Jane Cochran as she was secretly known to non-readers, who faked insanity to undertake one of the first pieces of investigative journalism from a women's mental institution in 1887 (she was trying to avoid being forced to write the "culture" section). And last is the "easy" one, Ada Lovelace, who effectively invented computer programming about a century before computers actually came about. How did you do at home?

I'm being a little unfair, because scientists of both genders are rarely recognisable visually unless they're either a bit of a celebrity like Professor Brian Cox. But even without making you guess from photos, how many of those women did you actually know about before that paragraph? My guess is "not five". Cecelia Payne-Gaposckin is almost definitely a "pointless" answer, despite the fact that she figured out the composition of 75% of the universe in her PhD thesis. How many soldiers and police officers (and skiiers!) running (or skiing) around in their kevlar know that they owe this innovation in their safety (or skiing speed (or in the case of Scandinavia, both)) to a mere woman? And this is not even scratching the surface of the historical women I wanted to talk about here. Rosalind Franklin, whose work was integral to the understanding of DNA, is held up as the prime example of a woman who was screwed over and shoved aside by the men she was working with. Gertrude Bell, whose new biography is sitting on my Kindle begging to be read, spent decades in British colonial politics in the 19th century ‒ a very dodgy area to be celebrating, so don't think for a minute I am, but she spent that time fighting for independent Arab countries during the colonial period and eventually helped to install Hashemite dynasties in Iraq and Jordan, which was politically quite momentous*. Despite this, you're much more likely to have heard of T.E. Lawrence of Arabia. Oh, and who discovered nuclear fission? Not just Otto Hahn.

These women are all anything but pointless. They all did incredible things that change the ways we live in ways both big and small. But we completely overlook most of them when we look back at history, in favour of thinking that history is a men's game. Women have been adding to the stock of human knowledge, often against huge personal odds, for as long as human beings have been around, and we've been casually taking that knowledge and forgetting where it came from for just as long. And then people look back at the historical record and have the gall to suggest that because they don't "see" women, there must be something particular about men which just makes them naturally better at all these things. We sometimes make the mistake of thinking it's a particular problem of the current age that the best self-publicists win out over the most talented people in a lot of fields, but really this has been going on for quite some time. And it's much easier to self-publicise, or to get other people to like you, when they're not instead spending all their time suggesting you are worthless and out of place.

From Friday onwards, I get a bit of a break from extreme writing, and whilst I certainly won't be shutting up after that, I'm very much looking forward to having some time to actually read and reflect on some of the things I've collected about these women, and a million other topics, in the last month. Not just because I'm a rabid feminist who only thinks women are interesting (although that becomes more true every day, to be honest), or because I'm about to write a novel involving historic women scientists (FACT, so pass on any and all others that cross your mind if you are an expert on this topic because chances are I only know a fraction of what I should still!). Mostly, because these are not pointless people, and shouldn't be in any sense of the word.

*I should also point out that she was a member of the anti-suffrage league because too many women thought they belonged in the kitchen and bedroom! and shouldn't be in politics! So with that and the whole colonial figure thing I'm not actually suggesting she is any kind of feminist hero, just that she's a woman who did stuff in history that you don't know about. Which is the kind of person I am talking about here.